Oh what the hell – put it on g1!

3/6/2002 – "Great players never castle," wrote Königsted in Kort Afhandling in 1784. While this is arguably the worst piece of advice ever published in a chess primer, even to this day many players give little thought to where His Majesty should reside. Robert Timmer has written a practical manual on the dangers of leaving the King in the center, and the possible drawbacks to castling too early, too late or on the wrong side. And our database program ChessBase provides interesting tools to research castling habits in chess. More

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Castling
to win

by FM Robert Timmer

The King is the most valuable piece on the chess board, yet many players give
little thought to where His Majesty should reside. Timmer's survey explains
the dangers of leaving the King in the center, and the possible drawbacks to
castling too early, too late or on the wrong side but also explains when you
should castle early or late and whether to go Kingside or Queenside. You can
order this entertaining little book ($23.95, special price for the week March
6-12: $13.95) here.

Piece probability

You may not know this, but our database program ChessBase offers excellent
research facilities on the subject as well. Take for instance the "piece
probability" function. It is excuted in the games list: simply mark a bunch
of games, right-click and execute the funtion from the context menu that appears.
We did this for the 2,018,426 games contained in our Mega 2002 database. This
causes ChessBase to play through all those two million games and record the
squares to which individual pieces moved. The results are displayed in nice
3D graphics.

In the above example the statistics for the white king are displayed. The program
has calculated on which squares the king spent most of its time – during
the period from move 10 to move 80. As you can see the square g1 is the easy
winner, indicating that most modern players castle kingside.

Here's the display for the black king, which not surprisingly also prefers
g8.

Here's another interesting function. Using the "Manoeuvres" tab in
the search mask you can find games in which one or both sides did not castle.

In the above example we are seaching for games in which the white king did
not move from e1 to g1 or from e1 to c1, between moves 1 and 80. The result:
in 181,993 out of 2,018,426 games (= 9%) White did not castle. You may be interested
to know that in 63,463 games neither side castled.

This is where the white king went when it did not castle. Interesting
that g1 still is a favourite square.

Tim Krabbé, the renowned Keeper of Chess Records, tells us that the
latest
castling came in Neshewat-Garrison, Detroit 1994, where Black played 48...0-0.
The latest queenside castling, 46...0-0-0, occurred in Mitenkov-Strukov, Geller
memorial USSR 1999. The greatest number of castlings in a single game, Tim tells
us, is three. It happened in the following jewel:

See also

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See also

8/27/2018 – Live games and commentary from Saint Louis! Fabiano Caruana, Magnus Carlsen and Levon Aronian tied for first place, while Caruana also tied for fourth place in the Grand Chess Tour standings with Wesley So, forcing a playoff match to be held on Tuesday. | Graphic: Saint Louis Chess Club

Video

The Elephant Gambit (1.e4.e5 2.Nf3 d5!?) has never really been given the attention it deserves. It is a very useful surprise weapon. Let us list the advantages of playing this particular opening: 1) Shock value 2) It is very aggressive. Black can take over the initiative early. 3) Many tricky lines 4) Unorthodox. Black is basically taking the game to the opponent as early as move two. Not many openings do that! It's a perfect opening for young players and club players to adopt. Let Andrew Martin select a repertoire for you on this 60 mins, which, if used with discretion, will rack up the points. I am sure that you will enjoy this unusual tour of the Elephant Gambit.